Forget ‘quiet quitting’ — many workers are still outright quitting their jobs as quickly as possible

This edition of Workforce Insights is written and reported by Taylor Borden.

How long should you stay in a job you don’t particularly like??

Conventional wisdom will tell you to stick it out for at least a year. But, should you resign yourself to that old-school thought or try your luck with the still-tight labor market before you hit the one-year mark?

These are questions U.S. workers have been grappling with recently. At the outset of the pandemic, hardly anyone was quitting their job of their own volition, though there were many involuntary layoffs. In 2021, as the economy started rebounding and the Great Reshuffle took hold, workers left jobs en masse in search of everything from larger paychecks to more fulfilling or more flexible work.

Now, it seems like U.S. workers are more comfortable with outright leaving their jobs quickly. The short tenure rate, or STR, which measures the fraction of positions that end after being held for less than a year, has increased across industries over the past couple of years, according to a new analysis from LinkedIn’s Economic Graph team.

Short tenures started a growth spell in August 2021 that peaked this past March when the STR was up 9.7% year-over-year. Today, workers are still leaving their roles more quickly than last year, but that growth has been slowing.

This suggests that workers are still confident in the tight labor market and expect to land jobs elsewhere, even amid economic uncertainty. After all, there are still about two available jobs for every person that wants one.

Some industries are seeing a more prevalent rise in quick quitting than others, as shown in the chart above. The STR in the arts and recreation industry, for example, rose 11.63% year-over-year in August, meaning workers are leaving their jobs more quickly this year compared to last year.?

Workers are also spending less time at each job in industries that are considered to be more traditionally white-collar, like tech, financial services and professional services, which mostly consists of accounting and consulting firms. Skills for workers in these typically well-paid industries are in-demand, so there’s a sense of leverage for those seeking out a new role.

On the other hand, there are a couple industries where workers aren’t leaving as quickly as they were last year. Take health care, for example. Growth in the short tenure rate for the health care industry peaked in September 2021 at +9.4% compared to a year earlier, and has been shrinking year over year since January. Earlier in the pandemic, nurses in particular left the industry in droves after sacrificing their health and wellbeing in understaffed, deteriorating working conditions while feeling underpaid. “Inflation has driven our workforce to seek employment that can and will pay higher wages,” Tony Strange, the CEO of Aveanna Healthcare, said on an earnings call last month. “We need to increase caregiver wages on average 15% to 25%,” he continued. Similar pledges could be keeping health care workers hanging on elsewhere, too.

Promises of higher pay could also be placating those working in retail, another industry that is seeing a shrinking STR. There’s been a boom in union activity this year — workers at 亚马逊 , 星巴克 , Trader Joe's and more are all organizing for more money and better working conditions. The U.S. has seen 180 strikes involving 78,000 workers in the first six months of the year — an increase of almost 80 strikes when compared to the same period last year. In the face of sky-high inflation and a still-tight labor market, workers have both the incentive and the security to join picket lines.?

“When you look at the jobs that are having trouble hiring, it’s the ones with really long hours, inflexible schedules, not great pay and limited benefits,” Paige Ouimet, a finance professor at the University of North Carolina that researches labor economics, explained to The Washington Post. These same factors contribute to quick quitting. Her warning to employers? “Running your workers — asking them to do 20% to 30% more because you’re short staffed — is very much a short-term strategy,” she said. “You’re going to keep losing people.”

Methodology:

The LinkedIn Short Tenure Rate is calculated by Economic Graph researchers to measure the fraction of positions that were held by LinkedIn members for less than a year. It analyzes the year-over-year change to deal with the natural seasonality in job tenure, such as summer jobs, internships and more. Select industries were not included in the analysis due to low data liquidity for the metric and/or differences in behavior that would render data from that industry incomparable to the others in this data set — such as farming, education, utilities, mining and others.?

LinkedIn data scientist Cristian Figueroa contributed to this article.